Learning and Development

With PPG’s increasingly global footprint and strategic focus on organic growth and innovation, our people are our most important competitive advantage.

A clear focus on learning and development is crucial to ensuring we keep our people engaged, productive and successful at every stage of their careers. We are committed to promoting from within wherever possible while also bringing in new ideas, thoughts and insights.

To ensure success, we offer a wide array of tools and training that includes:

Assessments;

Personalized performance and learning plans;

Formal and informal feedback;

Structured development programs;

Classroom, on-the-job and online learning;

Coaching; and

Mentoring.

In 2017, we built upon our efforts to accelerate employee development to keep the leadership pipeline as active and up-to-date as possible. We created a new vision and strategy for learning and development, which has enabled us to provide an even sharper focus on our areas of need to drive the company forward and ensure engagement of our people. The strategy supports three key areas: engage the organization, cultivate a customer-focused organization, and drive growth and profitability.

To support our company’s transformation, we introduced new leadership characteristics so that our employees are clear on what we expect from our managers. The characteristics will be used for our performance and talent processes. In addition, our Global Core Curriculum is built around these characteristics and serves as the foundation for our new learning and development architecture.

With this new architecture, we are accelerating our leadership pipeline via talent pools with the following dedicated development for each:

Emerging leaders— regional level

The Emerging Leader Program builds upon the Global Core Curriculum with courses on leading self, leading others and leading the organization.

Successors for regional strategic business general managers and regional heads of functions

Successors for global vice presidents

We focus on executive leadership and accelerated individual executive development through experiences, coaching, mentoring, outside executive education and exposure to thought leaders.

To ensure our employees are ready for the leadership levels through which they will pass, we will be introducing mandatory development for new managers and supervisors and for those becoming managers of managers.

In 2017, we provided approximately 20,000 of our employees with access to one of the world’s largest online learning platforms. Accessible at work and home and through a mobile device, the 6,500 online courses cover many aspects of business as well non-job-related personal development.

We also continued developing our functional leaders—manufacturing, technical, supply chain, human resources, finance and more—at local, regional and global levels during the year through role-specific training and a global development network.

People

From risk comes failure, and from failure comes growth and change. That is the philosophy behind an unconventional mindset training program at our Aerospace facility in Huntsville, Alabama, that reached more than 85 employees in 2017.

The internally developed training encourages employees to get out of their work comfort zone to seek challenges that stretch their capabilities and may knowingly end in failure. The training enabled the team responsible for the plant’s account receivables to increase the percent of current accounts by 13.3 percent during 2017. As one of the department’s employees explained, “This training has been a reversal of a previously programmed, lifelong thought process.”

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